THE FINITE DETECTIVE VS. THE INFINITE DETECTIVE

Dear Lori,

The final pages of chapter 72 in Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, brings up the question, “Who killed Cock Robin?” The answer: “Nobody. All people killed him. the moon, the sun, the stars, the wind, the downpour, the thinning ether, the hailstones, the atmospheric pressure, the echoes, the sky, all. . . He was killed by the death that was in him from the time of his birth . . .” The question, “Who killed Cock Robin” comes from an English nursery rhyme and still stands as one of the best known and most profound of children’s poetry. It is at the heart of the most well known genre of literature: The Detective Story and its corollary, the Courtroom Drama . A crime has been committed. A call goes out to investigate. There arises the person who knows how to read the “evidence,” to follow the “clues.” The conventions of the detective story are so well known they do not need to be rehearsed. Suffice it to say that the Detective is supernaturally skilled in the art of collecting “evidence,” and of separating what is likely to be helpful and what is not, of what constitutes a “clue” and what doesn’t. In the Cock Robin story, the evidence consists of all who were associated with the murder and who acted, consciously or not, in furtherance of it, from the sparrow who shot the deadly arrow, to the Kite who agrees to carry the coffin. Marguerite Young’s retelling blames celestial bodies, bad weather, echoes, and most pointedly the fact that he was already marked for death at birth. Inadmissible in the world of detective thrillers, “evidence” such as this would, in the well known phrase, be “thrown out of court.”

This novel pits two detectives against each other: Esther Longtree and a character known only as “The Chicago detective.” The playing out of their profound differences in the novel we are reading exposes the whole of detective fiction, from Oedipus to Hercule Poirot as a male fantasy (despite the late appearance of women sleuths such as Miss Marple) involving astounding demonstrations of deduction to “solve the crime.”

Born to abusive parents who accuse her of murdering her twin sister, Rosemary, in the womb, and doomed to working in a dingy greasy spoon cafe where she is “always feeding everyone,” Esther Longtree seems supremely unsuited to the role of super sleuth. Then one day she encounters a resident of the local hotel named Vera Cartwheel, who listens attentively to Esther’s long tale of woe and uses her immense if overactive imagination to transform Esther from stereotype to archetype, from “a big, dumb, mulish waitress” into the Great Bountiful Earth Mother, who, in her nourishing aspect is devoted to endless abundance and eternal pregnancy, and in her demonic form as the goddess of destruction, best represented by the Hindu goddess Kali, who suggests, among many other dark qualities, Dr. O’Leary’s “void.” As Great Mother, Esther is eternally pregnant and eternally barren, at this level, not to be thought of as inconsistent or contradictory. As Earth mother, both beneficent and malevolent, she bears multitudes of children to traveling salesmen, only to bury the babies, stillborn, in various hollows and trees and rivers, where she can still hear their cries, which, oddly enough, can only be heard by one other of the book’s characters, Moses Hunnecker, the bus-driver.

Esther’s earthiness is on full display in Chapter 73, where she recalls a tryst in a graveyard with a boxer, Joe Goldberg, the whole scene overseen by a lovingly described mule, Esther’s token animal, as essential to this book as Friday the sheep dog forever barking at the waves in expectation of the return of Miss MacIntosh. Many readers recall Chapter 73 as the depiction of a violent rape while others see it as an over zealous pugilist trying out his techniques on the mulish body of Esther Longtree resulting in the gestation of a“little shadow boxer,” there in Esther’s estimation and imagination, and believed by her in a later chapter to be a precious “shadow swimmer” rounding Cape Horn.

Also present in Chapter 73 is the Chicago Detective, whose graveyard trysts with Esther had produced, he believed, three children, all, according to Esther, stillborn like so many others. Convinced that Esther had murdered his children, he proceeds, with the skills of a “finite” detective, that is to say, skills honed by logic and ratiocination, to bring Esther to justice in a courtroom, where all the necessary evidence would be produced to find her guilty: “exhibits A,B,C, a long gold hair, a fingernail, a foot, exhibit D, a bloody leaf….the alphabet, a rubber doll. . .the shadows, and nothing, and nothing.” (1191). The Chicago detective, not interested in justice but in finding murderers, has all the necessary evidence, all the finite concrete evidence. Poor Esther Longtree, by contrast, described by Vera Cartwheel, our omniscient narrator, as the Great Mother of Life and Death, seen “knitting and unraveling the …black hood of night,” poor Esther , whose only “evidence” is “little voices trilling in her ear” and the mute testimony of an old mule, is nevertheless “the best detective in the infinite.” (1202) Esther, as infinite detective, emerges victorious over the finite Chicago detective by revealing that the novel we are reading is at heart a “quest” novel, and that the significance of that quest can only be communicated through metaphor, and the metaphor that matters, whether Grail, Whale, or a Waitress’s “large body which was many-doored and many windowed” must be expansive enough to reveal “the primordial connections between all things, the metaphor that underlies existence itself”*

* Towards the One and Only Metaphor, Miklos Szentkuthy

—Michael Sexson